In the case of introducing a new computer, it follows that a machine type for the introduction thereof is selected from plural types of machines each exhibiting different performance. One of criteria for selecting the machine type for the introduction is a selection criterion based on predicting whether a desired level of processing performance can be attained or not, alternatively whether a desired job can be processed within a desired period of processing time or not.
A conventional method of predicting the processing performance or the processing time described above is that a person predicts the processing performance, e.g., the processing time expended on executing a target process on the basis of manufacturer's announced CPU ability values and DISK ability values from processing performance information that is actually measured on, e.g., an active computer at the present as the case may be.
FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a procedure in the case of predicting the processing performance of a computer. In the example of FIG. 1, the active computer at the present executes a job program desired by a user such as a job program A, a job program B, etc. With the execution of the job program A etc., a Central Processing Unit (CPU) or an external storage device (e.g., DISK) etc. defined as resources of the computer are sequentially used under management of an Operating System (OS). The OS can extract processing performance information with the execution of the job program A etc. The processing performance information contains, e.g., CPU time when executing the job program A and DISK time. The DISK time is also called input/output time (I/O time). Extracted also in the example of FIG. 1 are the CPU time when executing the job program B concurrently with the execution of the job program A and the DISK time.
On the other hand, normally the manufacturers of the computers announce relative ability values of both of the active computer at the present and computers as candidates for the introduction. Accordingly, the extracted items of processing performance information are converted based on the announced relative ability values of the computers, and the processing performance information of the computers as the candidates for the introduction is respectively estimated as well.
While on the other hand, the following technology is also known by way of a processing performance prediction of predicting a variation in processing performance, which occur due to a change of a system configuration. Namely, in a job of the computer, an average period of usage time per once is obtained based on usage time and a usage count of each resource used by the job. Then, the usage time of each resource is changed by referring to a hardware processing ability information storage unit. Subsequently, the usage time of each resource and waiting time of each resource are obtained by performing a simulation.